Table of Contents

Creating and Recording a Show

This will give you a complete overview of a typical workflow in BoinxTV.

Creating a New Document

By default, BoinxTV will open a template chooser when first started. This option can be changed in the preferences. The template chooser can also be accessed from File → New with Template… Choose the Blank template and set your desired dimensions and frame rate to start from scratch.

Adding Content

All the elements of your show will be in layers and shown in the middle of the document window. Follow those links to read more about how to add layers and sources. The Blank template comes with a Placer layer in which you can add any source.

Setting the Recording/Output Preferences

You can set options to record your show to a file as you run it. Newly created documents will use the defaults set in the preferences. These can be changed for the current document through the Show menu. For information about the available codecs you can record with, visit this FAQ page. It is recommended to use Apple Intermediate Codec. There are several common frame rates available. For US TV, NTSC (30 FPS) should be used. For European TV, PAL (25 FPS) should be used.

If you'd like to calculate how fast your disk write speed should be, you can use this online tool.

You don't have to record your show to disk if you are broadcasting live. You may want to setup one of your computer video outputs as a fullscreen destination and just output your show to there. This could be sent to something like a projector or a studio broadcast system. It's important to consider what resolution you will want to output when creating your document. You can always change your dimensions after creating the document but it is best to design using the resolution you will ultimately be rendering when you run your show. The output will be scaled to fit the resolution of the display set in your System Preferences, so a small document will become pixellated if scaled to fit on a larger screen.

Running the Show

To the right of the status display there will be either a red circle (if set to record to disk) or red play button. Clicking this will start the show timers and initiate recording if set. Any layers set to be live at the show start will be enabled.

Show Timers

If no timers are set, the elapsed time is shown in the status display. Timers can be accessed in the Show → Timer… menu or in the slate icon to the left of the status display.

Use fixed Show Length: If checked, the show will end after a specified amount of time.

Show Length: Determines how much time will elapse until the show ends.

Counter goes: Determines whether the status display will count up to or down from the show length.

Enable Show End Trigger: If checked, clicking the stop button will send a Show End Trigger and then end the show after a specified amount of time.

Offset to Show End: Determines how long the show will continue to run after the stop button is pressed.

Exporting the Show

BoinxTV records your show as a QuickTime file with the codec you selected. After you stop the recording and the file finalizes writing, you can post process your recording. You can set wether these options appear automatically in the preferences. While writing the file, it will have an extension of .tvrecording until BoinxTV finalizes writing it, in which case it will become a .mov file.